Moral science has two halves. There are the implications of thinking straight about fact and value (ideal theory) and there are the implications of not thinking straight. Ideal theory is the foundation, error theory the daily battle.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

TBogg deleted evidence of cover up at the Flight 93 Memorial

TBogg has edited a comment thread to remove an important piece of evidence about the Memorial Project’s cover up of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the planned Flight 93 memorial. A historically important comment left by a consultant to the Memorial Project has been deleted.

INTERJECTION UPDATE: TBogg has posted an excuse for the deleted Flight 93 document, but the Wayback Machine says that he is not being honest. END INTERJECTION UPDATE.

In January 2006, I baited the TBogg leftists for insisting that it is perfectly okay to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. TBogg's comment thread swelled to epic proportions and eventually yielded something more than the usual litany of moonbat excuses for not thinking straight. At the end of the thread, posted sometime in March or April of 2006, there appeared an extended comment, about 600 words long, posted anonymously, and written as a semi-formal evaluation of my January 2006 report to the Memorial Project.

I would later find out that this anonymous comment was the sole piece of written feedback on which the Memorial Project was basing its denial of Islamic features in the winning design. (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, pp. 149-50.)

The Project only communicated snippets of the TBogg comment, so the fact that the whole thing had been posted online caught them by surprise, undermining their ability to control the story. In particular, the TBogg comment did not deny the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. On the contrary, it acknowledged that the crescent at the center of the memorial is geometrically similar to a traditional mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built), and offered a variety of excuses for why people should not be concerned about this similarity. (e.g. "[J]ust because something is 'similar to' something else, does not make it the 'same'.")

Dr. Kevin Jaques

Only in the last couple of weeks has the identity of the anonymous scholar who wrote the TBogg comment been learned. Last week’s blogburst about the Park Service's fraudlent internal investigation discusses a Memorial Project “White Paper” that identifies the TBogg commentator as Dr. Kevin Jaques, an Islamicist (a scholar of Islam), at the University of Indiana.

One of Dr. Jaques excuses for not being concerned about the half-mile wide Mecca-oriented crescent is that it is so much bigger than any other mihrab:

Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

You might recognize it as a giant crescent from an airplane like Flight 93 flying over head, but from the ground? Pshaw.

It’s too big to recognize!

TBogg deleted the Kevin Jaques comment from his comment thread

For most of 2007, the original TBogg comment thread has not been available, but TBogg now has it reposted, with one glaring omission: Dr. Jaques comment has been removed.

For posterity, here are copies of the original comment thread, as of 5/29/2006, with Dr. Jaques' comment intact at the end, and the comment thread repost, as of 12/3/2007, with Dr. Jaques' comment deleted.

A full discussion of what TBogg properly calls "the infamous comment thread" can be found in Chapter Eight of my Crescent of Betrayal book (download 3, pp 131-).

The question now for Mr. TBogg is why he deleted Kevin Jaques’ comment. Did he do it on his own, or did he do it at someone’s request? Did Dr. Jaques ask him to delete the comment? Did architect Paul Murdoch ask? Did someone in the Park Service ask?

Whether TBogg acted on his own or was prompted, it is obvious that he understood that he was deleting an important piece of evidence. Just the fact that he singled Jaques' comment out for deletion shows a conscious act of cover-up. Maybe he did not realize the full import of having the comment remain publicly available via its original source, but he certainly knew he was covering up something important.

What kind of blogger deletes a piece of evidence that he knows to be central to a high profile controversy? (Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R-CO) sent the Park Service a letter last month asking that crescent design be scrapped entirely.) This is very bad behavior.

Was TBogg’s comment thread originally removed in order to hide Jaques comment?

It was odd enough when the “infamous comment thread” first disappeared from TBogg's blog. What blogger removes anything famous from their blog? But at that time, there was no publicly available information that could have alerted TBogg to the significance of that last anonymous comment. The most likely explanation for the disappearance of the comment thread seemed to be that TBogg simply had a coding glitch, or maybe he is cheap enough to have been worried about bandwidth.

Now that the comment thread has been restored without the Jaques comment, it seems likely that the reason the comment thread came down in the first place was to hide the Jaques comment. The interesting thing about this scenario is that at the time the comment thread was removed (sometime between June 2006 and June 2007) the only way TBogg could have learned the importance of that last anonymous comment would have been through the internal investigation conducted by the Park Service in the spring and summer of 2006. No one else knew that the comment came from an advisor to the Memorial Project until July 2007 when I released the downloadable “Director’s Cut” version of my book. (Given the urgent public need to know, World Ahead Publishing graciously allowed me to make my then final draft available for free download until the print edition—still being updated—comes out in the first quarter of 2008.)

The TBogg comment thread was removed before the Director’s Cut release. (Noted in Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, at p. 131.) Chief Ranger Jill Hawk, who was conducting the investigation, would not tell me who wrote the anonymous TBogg comment, but I warned her to be suspicious. Given the overtly dishonest nature of its excuse making, I urged her to double check its provenance. She answered back that she had been able to get email confirmation of authorship.

This email communication with Jaques might well have alerted him to the faux pas he committed by posting his comment on the TBogg thread. Did he then contact TBogg and ask for the comment to be removed?

That would seem to be the most likely scenario. Others who were privy to the internal investigation could have also contacted TBogg, but there is no evidence for any other such route of transmission.

It is disturbing to think that TBogg would have acceded to any request to remove evidence about a possible enemy plot. He is fully aware of what I am claiming: that an al Qaeda sympathizing architect entered our open design competition with a plan to build a terrorist memorial mosque and won. Kevin Jaques' TBogg comment is crucial for understanding how such a plot could succeed, revealing the utter fraudulence of the internal investigation that should have detected any such plot. As the lone consultant to the Memorial Project on the crescent design, Jaques engaged in overtly dishonest excuse-making. And TBogg is willing to help him cover it up?

If TBogg has some other explanation for his deletions, the rest of us would sure like to hear it.

The fraudulent internal investigation

For more of Kevin Jaques' dishonest excuse-making, see last week's blogburst on the bogus internal investigation. Before the Park Service was done, it managed to round up two more academic frauds in addition to Kevin Jaques. There is Dr. Daniel Griffith, who claims there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca, and a third Mosqueteer still to be discussed. (Saving the worst for last.)

But Jaques is the central fraud, being the Memorial Project's sole source of feedback during a crucial period when its dismissive posture was set in stone. In addition to being an expert on sharia law, Jaques has also proved to be an expert at taqiyya.

UPDATE

TBogg has posted a reply. He says that he lost all his comment threads when he changed comment systems:

Sometime following that event, after I was done picking up the beer cans, cigarette butts, and the assorted discarded underwear, I switched from Blogspot comments to Haloscan. In the process, all of the previous comment threads were lost...

That prompted me to do some looking on Wayback Machine for what was deleted when (thanks to the first commenter for reminding me).

Turns out that the last Wayback copy of his Lunacy Abounds post that still has the comment thread (October 28, 2006), ALREADY has the Jaques comment deleted. That is, the Jaques comment was deleted before TBogg made the comment system change-over.

That looks bad, but with some further searching, I found that an innocent explanation is still possible. The Wayback copy from July 5th 2006 has the Jaques comment intact. Then on August 21st the whole comment thread is down. Then in October it is back up, without the Jaques comment at the end.

It is possible (and plenty plausible) that while TBogg was experimenting with changing over his comment system in August 2006, he used a backup from early March 2006 (before Jaques left his comment), and that is why the October 2006 thread and the currently posted thread lack the Jaques comment.

If this is what happened, well, it’s a good thing there is a Wayback Machine. But TBogg himself has not yet answered the question. He suggests the innocent explanation about the comment system switch-over, while adding:

So, yes. I have been busted. I've been getting more payoffs than Bill Bennett with a roll of nickels at Circus Circus. Between George Soros and Osama bin Laden I've received so many Miatas, that some of them are still sitting around in the blister packs.

Can we have a simple yes or no? Did TBogg intentionally take down the Jaques comment or didn’t he? And if he did, did he do it on his own or was he asked, and by whom?

Why do I have to ask this twice?

UPDATE II: Looks like TBogg is duping his readers

Upon further investigation, it is NOT plausible that the Jaques comment got chopped off by TBogg restoring his comment thread with an old back-up copy. It is not even possible. On all the Wayback Machine snapshots linked above, all of the comments are hosted by Blogger, not Holoscan, and Blogger does not have back-up and restore functions.

I was just looking into what us Blogger bloggers can do with comments, and we can only do three things. 1. We can open and close commenting. 2. We can hide or show comments. 3.) We can delete individual comments. People who leave comments also have the power to remove their own comments, so long as they were logged into blogger accounts when they left the comments.

Kevin Jaques posted his comment anonymously, so the only way it could have gotten deleted is if TBogg deleted it.

I also noticed that on the day when the TBogg comment thread shows up on Wayback as turned off (August 21, 2006) it is the only post of his that has the comments turned off. That obviously did not have anything to do with TBogg changing over from Blogger comments to Haloscan comments.

When TBogg temporarily turned the comment thread back on again (by October 28th, 2006) the Jaques comment is missing from the end of the thread. All still through the Blogger comment system. No Haloscan changeover had anything to do with any of this. (Did he ever actually change over. None of Wayback's snapshots say so, but they only have one link for 2007, and that won't open.)

TBoggs deception here is very Clintonesque. He does not actually lie to his readers. He never denies that he deleted the comment. Instead, he makes some noise about doing the comment system changeover, without ever claiming that the changeover was responsible for the disappearance of the Flight 93 evidence. Then he adds his: “I have been busted” statement, throwing in nonsense about taking money from George Soros so that no one would take his admission seriously.

Hey TBogglings. Looks like your mentor meant it when he said he was busted. Maybe he can come up with an innocuous explanation, but I sure don’t see how.

Crescent of betrayal/surrender Blogburst Blogroll

Want to join our blogbursts and be on the blogburst blogroll? Email Cao at caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com, with your blog's url address. The blogburst will be sent out once a week to the participants, for simultaneous publication on this issue on Wednesdays.

Turns out the web has long memory. Appears that Tbogg dropped about six other posts at the end of the comments when reposting. But for the moment, an independent archiver has the original, showing it was present as early as 2006/03/28.

Just deleted it, huh? Fancy that. And i bet that bastard tbogg isn't calling you back about that dinner date you've been wanting for months, either, huh? He's just such a tease sometimes. Try wearing a tight sweater next time you drop by his house; he's got a thing for man boobs, you know.

I'd suggest that there is medication for what you're suffering from but you're not the one suffering: it's anyone who comes into contact with your delusional ramblings.

A cursory look at the two comment threads makes it pretty clear to me that the thread was truncated, not edited. The comment spam that brackets the comment you attribute to Professor Jaques makes it look to me that the comment you cling to was tossed out with the trash. Your followers here almost reveal the truth: check out the "six other posts."

All the Google searches for "crescent mihrab" seem to point to you: this suggests that either Google is in on the conspiracy and is trying to make you look crazy or no one else cares. I guess it must be option A.

This is a pretty slender reed to cling to. If all your scholarship is so well-founded, you should be embarrassed, if you are still capable of it.

I never leave anonymous comments but I have to make an exception here. I really don't need any of your disciples looking me up to see if my garden stakes approximate a pointer to Mecca or if my address or street name can be made to reveal a verse of the Quran.

Man, too bad the forces of peace and justice keep getting thwarted because they foolishly post their most critical evidence on third-rate websites that the proprietors then dare to remove in clear acts of barbarism.

Seriously, we gotta get our act together on this. Wait, who was supposed to bring donuts this time?

Alex, I can't say that you're absolutely correct, because my life would then be in danger, but I will say that you're on the tracks and going somewhere.

Don't let these duplicitous left-leaning types turn you round, my friend. Someone has to tell the truth, and it might as well be you.

By the way, if I were you, I'd be very careful in your travels about town. There's no telling what these monsters might do to you. Anyone who would delete comments from a blog could be capable of just about anything.

Remember the French proverb: “In water one sees one's own face; But in wine one beholds the heart of another”. We know Muslims don't drink, so there you are.

Another French proverb comes to mind: “Think much, speak little, and write less”

You of course leave out the possibility that neither the design nor the removal of any posts or comments is a conspiracy of any type. That would pretty much invalidate your apparent reason for existence, so I can understand why you do. I just thought I'd point it out though.

You are SO right. Obviously we should ban the SEMICIRCLE from western civilization for all time. Roman arches? Tear them down! They're crescents on their side! Croissants? Ban them! Burn down the Au Bon Pains! The letter C? Eliminate it! Replace it with the letters S and K! Thank you for your tireless campaign on this critical issue.

There are many fine brands of decaffeinated coffee available in the market these days...mix it with a couple of Valium and don't call me in the morning. You are mentally unbalanced! Please seek professional help...and TBogg is funnier than you are...

I feel terrible that I did not know anyone as fine as Alec Rawls when I was matriculating at Leland Stanford Jr's farm. Perhaps 9/11 could have been prevented if his type of analysis had been more prevalent. Instead we must depend on abortion loving Giuliani to protect us from the Islamofascist menace which is trying to get all of our gays married to each other so they can buy eggs and sperm and create an army to drown us in unimaginable horrors.

Alec, I may be endangering my own life by writing this, but the truth must get out one way or another. You're on the right track and you have the scent of your prey, but you have to dig deeper. You have no idea how deep this goes. No one on the outside does, but you're the best hope of getting it out.

Your takedown of TBogg was admirable, but I fear that you've let him slip away. Don't move so fast next time, damn it. You've printed your expose before you dug into the really incriminating facts about TBogg, and you've bungled it awfully, because you've got people feeling sorry for him. I didn't think that was possible. In a conspiracy like this, you build from the outer edges and go step by step. If you shoot too high and miss, everybody feels more secure. You've put the investigation back months.

Listen to me, Alec: FOCUS! You're asking 'who' and 'how' when you need to be asking 'why' and 'when'. Think! You've got the details all wrong and muddled. They're not building a crescent and star on that memorial, they're building something that can be made INTO a crescent and star -- within hours -- when the time comes.

These things are all over America now, in every memorial that they can get an agent involved in. They're sitting there, proto-crescents and proto-islamic-slogans, just waiting to be transformed when the time is right. What do you think that time is?

This goes right to the top, where they're just waiting for the right moment, when the administration is at its weakest and its control over the armed forces wavers. When that time comes, the muslims staged in the millions just south of the border will come streaming over it, the ones already in sleeper cells in our cities will wake up, and all of those proto-symbols will be converted over as the wave sweeps up from Mexico and out from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. We'll turn into the center of the caliphate overnight, and the islamists will control the most powerful army in the world.

I can't name the people at the top of this conspiracy, because they have filters on internet traffic and they'd find me and track me down, but I'm sure you can read between the lines. We have to stop this.

I'll try to get you more information as I can, and work to weaken them from the inside. We have to mount a resistance before it's too late. We're years behind them, but we can still beat them iohgod somone's cming i havto goSAJdasdfasdALALFKDSL

About Me

Here is a short bio I sent to press people covering the Flight 93 memorial debacle. My training is as an economist. I was in the PhD program in economics at Stanford until my research led me more towards moral theory and constitutional law, at which point I dropped the program and started working on my own. I was writing a book on republicanism (the system of liberty under law) for World Ahead Publishing when I discovered that the Flight 93 memorial was going to be a terrorist memorial mosque. World Ahead agreed to first publish my book about this rehijacking of Flight 93 (Crescent of Betrayal, temporarily available for free download at CrescentOfBetrayal.com). This is not my first venture into journalism. Over the years I have been a writer, opinions editor, and advisor for Stanford’s conservative campus newspaper The Stanford Review, and am currently on the Review’s board of directors.